Personal Law

By Viola Edward & Michael de Glanville…. 

Knowing oneself

“Knowing oneself is the beginning of wisdom and the end of fear.”

The most rewarding journey that you can undertake is the one of connecting with the feelings of your heart and discovering yourself. Getting to know yourself is a voyage of personal growth, of understanding your behaviour, the causes of your different moods, the dynamics of your relationships and encounters with others. It is the discovery of who you really are as a complete being, access to happiness will be much easier for you with this knowledge. Allowing yourself to observe your fears and daring to go beyond imaginary limitations will set you free.

This process of getting to know yourself will lead you to important decisions, catalyse changes in your life and provide you with the opportunity of discovering who you are when you choose to put aside the game of appearances, the game of being the one who others would like you to be. By working on yourself and constantly observing your thoughts, feelings and actions, you’ll discover that, behind all of the perceptions and projections of your mind, there is a creative and loving being filled with a wisdom that can transcend all kinds of limitations.

We hold the key

Of all the precious spiritual truths that we have managed to retain throughout our history, none has more potential than the concept that we are the master of our own thoughts, the shaper of our own personality and the creator of our own situation and destiny. As beings of power, intelligence and love, we hold the key to almost every situation and possess within ourselves the skills to materialise transformation, regenerate and make of ourselves whatever we desire.

The chatter of the mind

An endless stream of thoughts goes through our minds like a video on repeat. Scientific research has shown that the mind has somewhere between 80,000 and 300,000 different thoughts every day.  “The constant chatter of the mind is an obstacle in the path of meditation. You can’t sit in silence for even a minute without the mind starting to chatter. Thoughts keep flowing, whether they are relevant or irrelevant, whether they make sense or not, there is a constant flow of mind traffic…” Osho.

More Negative than Positive

Research shows that 80% of all our thoughts get repeated again and again until we come to believe them. Thought is creative and it is powerful. We then create what we believe. This concept becomes quite dramatic if we take the results of other research, which shows that in the cases of people not having developed the creative ability of thought, 78% of all thoughts are negative and only 22% are positive. It is sad to think that it’s our negative thoughts that get repeated more often! No wonder we get the poor results that we do and that the world is in the state that it is today.

The Inner Child

One component of your belief system is your hurt inner child. Therapist Ron Kutz centres directly on ‘inside material’ when applying his Haikaní therapy system. He maintains that this material gets organised as an internal experience in the following way: “All of our inside material, which is made up of our very first feelings, beliefs and memories, forms as a response to the stress caused by our surroundings during childhood”. This material may be illogical and primitive but for the helpless, vulnerable child, it was the only way to learn how to survive. Once the inside material is formed, it forms a kind of lens, or filter, through which all new experiences pass. This explains why some people continually choose to live out the same kind of destructive emotional relationships time and time again, why life for others is an on-going trauma and why the majority of us don’t know how to learn from our mistakes.

Rose tinted glasses

Freud called this urge to repeat the past “the repetition impulse” while a term for it in contemporary therapy is “the logic of absurdity”. It is logical when you understand how this inner material shapes your life. It’s like seeing everything through rose-coloured glasses (you see everything tinted according to the colour of the lens). According to the hypnotherapist Milton Erickson, everyone has his or her own individual view of the world, an unconscious inner belief system that acts as a kind of hypnotic trance. It is obvious, therefore, that if you want to change your life, you will have to change your inside material (the tint of your glasses).

Source of human misery

Dr. John Bradshaw  “When as a child your development gets stunted and emotions of anger and pain get repressed, you grow up to be an adult with an angry, hurt inner child inside of you. This inner child will unconsciously contaminate your behaviour as an adult. It may seem absurd at first that a small child continues to live in an adult’s body, but I believe that this hurt and abandoned inner child, from our past, is the main source of human misery and will continue to contaminate every adult’s life until they reclaim and truly nurture their own inner child.”

The Conscious Master

Man is always his own master, even during those moments of greatest weakness and when he feels abandoned. In those moments, it is the unconscious mind that governs the house, and governs badly. Relaxing into the condition that you find yourself in and assiduously searching for the underlying laws that govern your being is a practice which will give you self-control and wisdom. You then become able to direct your energy and apply your thoughts to more productive matters. This is the conscious master and the individual can only become one by discovering within him or herself the laws that govern thought. Such a discovery can only be made by applying oneself to the work of self-discovery and through self-analysis and experience.

Personal Law

Leonard Orr and Sondra Ray originated the term ‘Personal Law’. See their classic book “Rebirthing in the new age.” Digging deeply into the mine of the soul shows that each one of us has a huge number of negative beliefs, all of them the result of our individual life history. This personal belief system as a whole is known in Rebirthing technique as “I BELIEVE”. Amongst all of these beliefs there is one group that affects us to a much greater extent and within this group there is one belief which is the root of all others. This root belief is repeated so many times that it ends up becoming a LAW.

This recurring negative belief is known as the PERSONAL LAW or PERSONAL LIE in Rebirthing. Due to the fact that thought is creative, the constant unconscious repetition of this negative thought makes it come true. This is why it is known as a law. It is, however, a great big lie that negates the true nature of one’s being, because it is an idea that is totally individual and based on one’s own life history and how one has interpreted that history. When two people live through the same event, each one, even in the case of twins, will experience it differently and they will both come to entirely different conclusions and create different laws or none at all. It is not the experience that affects us but our interpretation of the experience.

The cornerstone of negativity

Any incident or event could be the origin of your personal law and this law may even have been formed during gestation or at birth. However, it is not the origin that is important but the belief itself. For example, if you were an unwanted or illegitimate child, your law could be “I’m not wanted”. Because thought is creative, you will then go on to unconsciously create circumstances in your life that make you feel “not wanted” over and over again. Personal law is the cornerstone of your negative belief system and that is what creates the ego. As long as it remains undetected, your personal law works away on an unconscious level and you will be totally unaware of it. If someone’s personal law is “I’m not capable” or  “I’m not up to it”, he or she may unconsciously decide that they are “not capable” and will become totally “useless” in some, if not every, area of their life.

Alternative belief systems

The mind also creates another group of beliefs on a subconscious level in order to conceal the personal law from the people around us. If your law is “I’m not capable”, you will be endlessly trying to demonstrate the opposite (I AM capable). Trying to impress others with how capable you are and pretending to be capable in general, will only create struggle and exhaustion and be a waste of energy. It is totally unnecessary to pretend that you are capable because all human beings are naturally born with this attribute. This alternative belief system, with which we surround our essential being, is known as I PRETEND.

Both systems (I believe and I pretend) are a negation of our essential being or true Self. As human beings, we have been blessed with attributes, virtues and natural talents (in the image and likeness of the universe). Our perception of external situations, however, leads us to unconsciously surround ourselves with a layer of negative belief systems that is so strong that we struggle and get exhausted from creating yet another layer on top to conceal it. We pretend to be what we believe we’re not and ignore what we really are.

Accompanying Laws  In the following eloquent passage, Tagore refers to the falseness of I BELIEVE and I PRETEND: “He, whom I confine in my name, is crying in some dungeon. I am always busy building a wall around me; while this wall ascends to Heaven day by day; I lose sight in its shadow of my truthful being. I am proud of this great wall and enhance it with dust and sand, fearing the slightest hole that may appear in my name but in spite of all my care, I lose sight of my truthful being”.

*Thought is creative and you are the thinker.

*The universe rearranges itself to adapt to the way that you perceive reality.

*Your negative thoughts, beliefs and expectations produce results in the physical world.

*Negative thoughts, together with beliefs in the negation of life, bring about negatives results.

*Positive thoughts and positive beliefs about life produce positive results.

Results we don’t want

The problem is that many of the thoughts that create our experience of personal reality are unconscious. They are conclusions based on a mistaken perception at some point a long time ago and are in fact neither appropriate nor real. The problem is that they produce results that we don’t want.

One frequently comes into contact with thoughts and beliefs of this kind in a Rebirthing session. With your Rebirther’s support, you can gradually transform them so that they stop producing undesirable results in your life. Most people, who have had experience with Rebirthing, find that their intuition becomes enhanced as their mind, body and emotions become clearer. By transforming your limiting thoughts and belief patterns, you find that your outlook on life changes. Our outlook on life is the foundation of our behaviour.

If you believe that people hurt you, you can experience this and you can find yourself in situations where people seemingly hurt you and do you harm. On the other hand, if your belief is that people are loving and that they support you, then you can experience this feeling instead. If you are not master over the power of your mind, you will feel like a victim whose mind is programmed with the thoughts and beliefs of other people (your parents, friends, T.V, the press, advertising, etc.). Your real life situation will reflect whatever you believe to be true. A simple way of understanding this is to think of there being two parts to the mind:

The Thinker and the Checker.

The “thinker” does the thinking and the “checker” puts the evidence together to show that whatever the thinker is thinking is true and it does this by gathering evidence of any kind of belief that you may have about your life experience or your interpretation of it.

The checking part of the mind uses:

The Law of Attraction, The Law Projection/Perception/Interpretation and The Law of Manifestation/Transformation to do this.

The Law of Attraction: You draw into your life everything that matches and fits in with your belief system.

The Law of Projection/Perception/Interpretation: You interpret everything in accordance with your belief system, regardless of whether anyone else interprets it in the same way or not. You interpret everything you see and experience exactly the way you expect to see or experience it. This process is often based on past experience so this is how you perceive reality. This way of perceiving and interpreting things becomes so much a part of you and so powerful that you project it onto others.

The Law of Manifestation/Transformation: People and/or situations in your life that don’t fit in with your beliefs and expectations will either stop being a part of your life or be “transformed” so that they do. This is because you unconsciously create situations that bring up the behavioural patterns in others that in turn reconfirm your law.

About Rebirthing.

Rebirthing is a forceful way of getting in contact with and reclaiming your own individual power. “Inspiration” means ‘the drawing in of breath’. As you breathe in more vitality (Chi/Prana/Ki) and let go of negativity that you have been holding on to from the past, you naturally begin to open up on an intuitive level and become more sensitive and aware of both your spirituality and your ability to experience higher levels of consciousness. It is all a matter of renouncing the hold that your past has had on you. This inner process opens you up to a more profound experience of who you really are and helps to bring you in line with the true meaning of your life.

Next Article

We will be continuing to develop the different and creative ways that we use to cope with our conflicts and some of the pathways that help us to untangle the situation…

Contact Us

If you are interested in deepening your knowledge about “The creative thinking” you can participate in sessions with Viola and Michael.

We would love to hear from you with your comments, experiences and questions. Contact us at info@violaedward.com.  Mob. 0533 867 3685.  FaceBook: ViolaEdward Coaching

You can download a free copy of Viola’s book “Breathing the Rhythm of Success” and find a collection of previous articles in this series from   http://www.violaedward.com

About Viola & Michael.

Viola came to Cyprus from Venezuela in 2002 to join Michael who was born on the Island and returned from France in 1999. Viola and Michael are both trained therapists in Breathwork and they founded Kayana Ltd in 2003. Viola specialises in Relationship Coaching, Business Consulting and Colour and Image. Michael has an Engineering background and specialises in Massage and Watsu.